Features
- Cover Type: Paperback with 384 pages
- Published by: Kodansha Globe November 17, 1997
- Written in: English
- ISBN 10 Number: 156836198X
- ISBN 13 Number: 978-1568361987
-
Book Dimensions:
8.2 x 5.4 x 1.1 inches
- Weighs: 12.8 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Now that God's biography has been written, by Jack Miles, it's time to give the Devil his due. Messadie's book is the finest of the legion of recent books released about the archfiend and his cohorts. Using a comparative and phenomenological approach, the author traces the idea of the Devil from ancient Greece and India to contemporary Western culture. What emerges from Messadie's explorations is that the Devil is a very recent concept, arising primarily out of Zoroastrianism in Persia in the sixth century B.C. In that religion, a personified evil being is coexistent and coeval with a personification of the good, and Messadie looks at how that dualism has slipped into Christianity, in particular. Thus the author concludes, on the basis of careful historical study, that the Devil does not exist in societies where the need for a force opposing the good is absent. Finally, Messadie aptly demonstrates how people in contemporary culture, in the absence of the personification of evil, use the Devil to vilify their enemies and to promote hatred.
Copyright 1996 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
Given the great success of books about angels, is it any surprise that the Fallen Angel himself, the devil, wants to horn in on the territory? Actually, Messadie's book is a comparative historical study of the development of the concept of the devil in different cultures, from ancient Oceania to 20th-century Europe and America. While the idea of the devil as evil personified is often absent from Eastern cultures, such an idea is common to many Western cultures. Yet Messadie's conclusions call into question the existence in the late 20th century of a personified evil figure whose presence often becomes the pretext for human abdication of moral responsibility. Massadie's highly engaging and provocative cultural history is essential for most libraries.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Reader ReviewsThis book is a cross-cultural examination of how different societies have attempted to explain evil. Messadie describes the traditional religions of India, China, ancient Greece and Rome, Africa and the pre-Colombian Americas as having a generally more unitary and tolerant theology. Meanwhile, Western religions, especially Christianity and Islam, are shown to be dualistic, believing that God and the Devil are waging an ongoing struggle for world domination and control of the human soul. Messadie traces the origin of this mythical fallacy back to the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. It is here, through a God named Ahura Mazda and a Devil named Ahriman, that we find the most important theological foundation for the dualism that is to later soil Western religion. Interestingly, Messadie makes a convincing case that in the Old Testament Satan is generally shown to be acting in accord with the wishes of God. For example, the suffering Satan causes Job, so that Job may be forced to demonstrate his faith, is done with God's blessing. But it is in the New Testament that Satan is continually depicted as the enemy of God. This Christian obsession with defeating the Devil is shown to have tragic historical consequences. For example, Messadie writes about how church and state authorites conspired in the Middle Ages to imprison and murder various such "Devil inspired" heretics as the Cathars in order to maintain religious and and political control while also profiting from the property they confiscated from the victims. He even suggests that it was the Inquisition that served as the ultimate model for the Nazi and Stalinist legal systems. Personally, I think that the Western religious belief in dualism is one of its primary theological errors. Messadie seems to share a similar viewpoint. In fact, this book is a well written and thoroughly researched effort to show how this irrational belief in something that doesn't exist - "the Devil" - has historically caused, and continues to cause, immense suffering and tragedy.
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